CMPT 455 / 826 Information Modeling & Retrieval

Critiques

Purposes of a Critique

Critiques get you thinking about the important parts of what is contained in a paper, by getting you to go beyond what it contains.
NOTE: Critiques are not book reports or summaries of an article.

Critiques are very important for our class, since they will form the basis of some of our discussion of the topics.

Critiques are worth 20% of your mark in the course.

Submitting your Critique

All students are required to e-mail the instructor their critiques (containing the content discussed below) of selected readings (listed below) by 12 noon on the Friday prior to the week where they are to be discussed.

The subject of the e-mail should be "455/826 Critique for week xx", where week xx is the number of the week the critique is for (not the number of the week in which it is to be handed in).

It is preferred (but not required) that students use the critique template for formatting their critiques.

It would be appreciated if you would follow the following convention for the files you send for your weekly critique

Please name the files: nn-your name

where nn is the number of the week that the critique is for (e.g. the first critique is for week 02 even though it is due at the end of week 01)

Please send the files in Word (doc) format - that way I can respond by using track changes for my comments

Contents of a Critique

All critique assignments are found on the CMPT 455/826 home page in the class outline. Papers to be critiqued are identified in bold face type.

Do a critique of the readings assigned for next week's class by identifying and discussing at least five major challenges and/or opportunities.

Challenges identify portions of a reading where significant improvements should be made.
Opportunities identify omissions from a reading where significant additions should be made.

Each discussion of a challenge or opportunity should:

identify the challenge or opportunity

Challenge: what needs improvement (further discussion and/or consideration of an alternate viewpoint)
or Opportunity: what's missing (not discussed but should be included in a discussion of this area)

it is expected that identification involves:

a meaningful self-descriptive name for the challenge / opportunity
a brief elaboration / discussion of what is involved
information about the location in the chapter the challenge / opportunity occurs

explain the significance of the proposed addition or improvement

be specific as to what the significance is and how it may effect the success of applying this information in performing Usability Engineering
- Challenges can be significant
- Opportunities can be significant
it is expected that significance involves:

a good reason why we should discuss this challenge or opportunity in class

suggest what should be done about this challenge or opportunity

this should be the starting point for our discussion in class
it is expected that your suggestion includes

a summary of what you think about or need to know about this challenge or opportunity

it may be useful to provide particular references to support your suggestions

Each critique is marked out of 10.

Getting a better mark than a 7 generally requires going significantly beyond just meeting the basic requirements.
Individual items (challenges or opportunities) may get either a 0, 1, or 2.

Items that are not significant or that repeat other items get a 0.
Items of weak significance or where the suggestions are not strong enough will typically get a 1.
The best an incompletely documented item can get is a 1.

Getting full marks on a critique is based on having at least 5 strong critique items.

Critiques may go beyond the basic requirement of discussing 5 challenges and/or opportunities (the best 5 will be marked).

Bonus marks may also be awarded to items with exceptional insights and/or helpful suggestions and/or good references that support a suggestion.

Examples of strong critique items from another course include (each of these items would be worth 2 marks so 5 items of this quality would get the full 10 marks available):

1. Example of an Opportunity:

Identification

Type: Opportunity
Name: Interviewing Techniques
Discussion: This section discusses gathering information from users via interviews or questionnaires. What recommendations are there for constructing the questionnaire and/or interview?
Location: Ch 4.4.3, page 35

Significance:

Interviewing is a technique talked about the book which is used by Usability Engineers in order to obtain information from users prior to building the system. It would be helpful to provide insight regarding interviews and questionnaires because these tools can be the key to obtaining a good analysis of the system.

Suggestion:

[a weak suggestion (for a 1 point critique) would be] Items such as questionnaire/interview length, question format (open ended, closed ended, multiple choice, etc), question order should be discussed.
[a strong suggestion (for a 2 point critique) would be to suggest a means of satisfying the opportunity] http://www.usabilitynet.org/tools/methods.htm provides a good discussion of various uasbility methods.

2. Example of a Challenge:

Identification

Type: Challenge
Name: Wisdom
Discussion: At the beginning of this section, it is pointed out that Data, information, knowledge, and perhaps even wisdom make up the contents of our Web pages.
Location: 6.1.5 Facts and Opinions, page 8

Significance:

I think is impossible to do what this is asking us.

Suggestion:

Based on the definition of “wisdom” in last section and my personal understanding, I don’t think wisdom can be represented in web pages as content. The reason is that wisdom is human being’s ability to use mastered knowledge to evaluate decision and make decision in the unknown area. It is hard to show this kind of abstract concept. Maybe web site can provide a scenario to help users develop their wisdom.

(I expect that the above can be answered in 2 - 3 printed pages)

For further information please see Guidance on Creating Good Critiques

Readings are available via direct links, where possible, or available to students who loginto the University of Saskatchewan Library [where bibliographic information is provided]

Critique due	Critique ID	Reading to be critiqued
Sept 10	week 02	J.B. DeLong & A.M. Froomkin, Speculative Microeconomics for Tomorrow's Economy
Sept 17	week 03	Lars-Erik Axelsson, Identify User Profiles in Information Systems with Unknown Users - A Database Modeling Approach
Sept 24	week 04	W.J. Kettinger, Information Architectural Design in Business Process Reengineering [Journal of Information Technology, 11, 1:27-37, (March 1996)]
Oct 1	week 05	V.C. Storey, Understanding Semantic Relationships [Very Large Data Bases, 2(4):455-488, October 1993]
Oct 8	week 06	"Chapter I - The Syntactic and the Semantic Web" from Semantic Web Services: Theory, Tools and Applications by Jorge Cardoso (ed), 2007, available from Books 24 x 7 via the University of Saskatchewan Library
Oct 15	week 07	J. Trujillo, M. Palomar, J. Gomez & I.-Y. Song, Designing Data Warehouses with OO Conceptual Models
Oct 22	week 08	J. Horner, I-Y Song, P.P. Chen, An Analysis of Additivity in OLAP Systems [Proceedings of the 7th ACM international workshop on Data warehousing and OLAP
Oct 29	week 09	M. Goebel and L. Gruenwald, A Survey Of Data Mining And Knowledge Discovery Software Tools
Nov 5	week 10	C.C. Kuhlthau, Inside the Search Process: Information Seeking from the User’s Perspective [Journal of the American Society for Information Science 42(5):361-371, 1991]
Nov 16	week 11	I. Herman, Graph Visualization and Navigation in Information Visualization: A Survey [IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 6(1):24-43, January-March 2000]
Nov 23	week 12	AICPA, Trust Services Principles, Criteria and Illustrations for Security, Availability, Processing Integrity, Confidentiality, and Privacy